In recent years, publisher Wizards of the Coast has focused on two very different segments of the Magic: the meeting audience. On the one hand you have the multiplayer playstyle called Commander, perhaps the game’s most popular format. On the other hand, you have the ambitious Universes Beyond products, designed to turn the heads of lapsed fans and non-players alike with products that support multiple play styles. Now the trading card game is returning to its roots with a new set called Foundationsa collection of cards and a carefully crafted gaming experience, designed especially for newcomers.
Foundations Launching on November 15th, it will have all the hallmarks of a main set release – including Play boosters, Collector boosters, Jumpstart boosters and Bundles, as well as all the same pre-release splendor as any other new set of cards. But it also contains two new onesMagic products: a Beginners box and a Starter Collection.
Image: Wizards of the Coast
Image: Wizards of the Coast
Wizards’ game design director Bryan Hawley told Polygon that the Beginners box contains 10 packs of 20 cards each, with two packs for each of the cards Magic‘s five colors of mana. Using a mix-and-match system originally designed for the Jumpstart product line, players can mix and remix these 10 packs into many different decks. At least some of these packs will be pre-shuffled, with the intention that players will open and explore them first, along with a detailed, step-by-step written tutorial.
“One of the things that Foundations “really tries to do something different than any of our previous attempts at an onboarding experience,” Hawley said, “to really focus on that entire path, (a new player of) I’m interested in magic, but I know nothing! up through Oh, I discovered what I like to do and I’m going to do it more often! So the Beginners box is a significantly more expansive experience with much more content (than previous starter sets). You can play dozens of games straight out of the box.”
Image: Wizards of the Coast
Image: Wizards of the Coast
Once players the Basic Beginners Box of 200 cards, then they can move on to the Starter CollectionThat box of 350 cards will help them expand on the themes and techniques they’ve already discovered, while also ensuring that they remain within the warm embrace of a kind of estuary—a place of calm that should remain stable even as multiple new sets of cards are released year after year.
That long-term stability is a new feature for Magic as a whole. When a new set of cards is released, it only remains viable — that is, “legal” for play in certain formats — for about three years. Hawley said that cards from the Foundations The set will be legally playable until at least 2029, almost twice as long as normal.
“Our hope and intention is that as long as the set continues to do its job,” Hawley said, “it will help new players learn the game, get used to the game and discover what they love about the game – And because it is the basis for Standard in general, it will remain Standard legal.”
Magic: The Fundamentals of Collecting‘ Beginners box will retail for $29.99, while the larger Starter collection costs $59.99. Expect more information from Wizards closer to its release this fall.